Historical Description

Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger 139 (1975) is a fantastic work in Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger portfolio. Jagger, looking over his shoulder at the viewer, is obscured by layers of translucent beige and maroon that are transposed on his face and body. Warhol’s Mick Jagger employs patches of opaque black conceal his neck and provide a great contrast to the burgundy and off-beige patches that otherwise color the work. The screenprinted photograph is juxtaposed against Warhol’s hand-drawn linework that gives the work a personal touch. Warhol’s Mick Jagger 139 is an extraordinary image in Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger portfolio that captures his photogenic and infamous celebrity status.

Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger portfolio was created in 1975, just over ten years after Warhol and Jagger’s first meeting in New York in 1964. This was not their first creative collaboration; the two became close when Warhol designed the album cover of the Rolling Stones’s Sticky Fingers in 1971. The Mick Jagger portfolio is comprised of 10 screenprints, each based off an expressive and evocative photograph Warhol took of Jagger. Warhol’s choice to combine photography, drawing, and color-blocking is provocative, draws on the emergence of non-representational and mixed media forms in the 1970s. At this point in his career, celebrities were shelling out $25,000 to get portraits in Warhol’s Pop Art style and Jagger’s fame was at its height. Capitalizing on this moment, Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger portfolio makes a strong statement about the commodification of their own fame.

Created in 1975, Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger 139 is a color screenprint on Arches Aquarelle (rough) paper, and is signed by the artist in pencil in the lower right. Most of the prints are also signed in black, green, or red by Mick Jagger. It is a unique work of an edition of 250, 50 AP, 3 PP, published by Seabird Editions, London England, and printed by Alexander Heinrici, New York.

Catalogue Raisonné & COA:

Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger 139, from Mick Jagger portfolio (1975), is fully documented and referenced in the below catalogue raisonnés and texts (copies will be enclosed as added documentation with the invoices that will accompany the sale of the work).